The Templar Salvation

Chapter 12

CONSTANTINOPLE

MAY 1310

Five hundred hyperpyra? That’s … that’s just outrageous,” the French bishop blurted.

Conrad of Tripoli wasn’t moved. He held the old man’s gaze with the serenity of someone who had done this many times before, and shrugged. Not a cold, demeaning shrug. He made sure he maintained an air of con-geniality and, above all, respect. “We really shouldn’t be haggling over a few pieces of gold, Father. Not when it involves something this sacred.”

They were seated at a discreet table, tucked away in a dark corner of a tavern in the district of Galata, a Genoese colony on the north shore of the Golden Horn. Conrad knew the owner of the tavern well and often conducted his business there. He could count on him to give him the privacy he needed and lend a hand if things got messy. Not that Conrad needed much help. He had seen more fighting and spilled more blood than most men could even imagine, but that was part of a long-gone past that he kept to himself.

The gilded box sat squarely on the table. It was a small masterpiece with an embossed, floriated design on its side and a large cross on its lid. Inside, it was lined with frayed velvet cushioning that looked like it was centuries old. When Conrad had first presented the priest with the reliquary, the bones it housed had been wrapped inside a sheet of vellum that bore the markings and seal of the Patriarch of Alexandria. They were now laid out on the padded base of the container, their ancient yellow-gray pallor contrasting vividly against the burgundy padding.

The bishop’s thin, long-nailed fingers trembled as he reached out to touch the bones again. From the talus to the metatarsals, they were all there.

“Sacred, indeed. The foot of Saint Philip,” he muttered, his eyes brimming with reverence. “The fifth apostle.” His fingers cut the air gently as he crossed himself yet again.

“The man who kept preaching right to the bitter end, even while he was crucified upside down,” Conrad said. “A true martyr.”

“How did you get hold of them?” the priest asked.

“Please, Father. We are not in confession here, are we?” Conrad smiled, teasing him for a moment before leaning in and lowering his tone. “There are many crypts in this city. Under the Chapel of the Holy Virgin of Pharos, inside the walls of the Great Palace, at the church in Pammakaristos … if you know where to look, they’re there. The holiest of treasures, tucked out of harm’s way just before the great sack and now waiting to be unearthed and returned to their rightful glory. And as anyone will tell you, I know these dungeons like the back of my hand,” he smiled, raising his right hand. “But I need to know if you want these or not, Father. There are other buyers waiting … and I need the funding to continue my work if I’m ever going to lay my hands on the greatest treasure of them all.”

The bishop’s eyes bulged wide. “What treasure it that?”

Conrad leaned in closer. “The Mandylion,” he whispered.

The bishop sucked in a sharp intake of breath and his face lit up. “The Mandylion of Edessa?”

“The very same. And I think I’m close.”

The bishop’s fingers started twitching greedily. “If you were ever to find it,” he said, “I would be very, very interested in acquiring it for our cathedral.”

Conrad inclined his head casually. “As would many of my clients. But I’m not sure I’d ever want to part with it. Not when the image of our Lord himself is imprinted on it.”

The old priest’s lips were quivering visibly now, his wrinkled fingers beseeching the air between them. “Please. You must promise. Let me know when you have it. I’ll pay handsomely.”

Conrad reached out and brought the man’s withered forearms back down on the table. “Let’s conclude this matter first, shall we? The rest we can talk about, when the time comes.”

The bishop studied him for a beat, then smiled, a thin-lipped, rotted-toothed smile that was a fair match for the bones he was buying. They agreed on a time when they would meet up again for the exchange, then the old man got up and walked off.

Conrad cracked a satisfied grin as he packed up the bones and hollered out an order for a pitcher of beer. He took in the bustle out in the tavern’s main room. Merchants, aristocrats, common folk, and whores, wheeling and dealing and getting drunk in a raucous blur of pidgin Italian—the lingua franca of the Galata district—and laughter.

Quite a change from the austerity of his previous life, as a warrior-monk of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—the Templars.

He smiled. The city had been good to him.

It had taken him in and allowed him to create a new life for himself, which hadn’t been easy. Not after all the setbacks and disasters that had befallen him and his brethren, not after they’d all been turned into hunted men. But things were going well for him now. His reputation was growing with every sale. And he particularly enjoyed the fact that he was prospering at the expense of those who had brought about the demise of his Order, fleecing those whose ilk had caused him to end up in Constantinople.

If they only knew, he thought with great relish.

Like his adoptive city, Conrad was rising from the dregs of a Vatican-bred calamity. His troubles had begun with the defeat at Acre in 1291, almost two decades earlier, a disastrous battle that ended with Conrad, his fellow Templars, and the rest of the crusaders losing the last major Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, and resulted in the mass arrests of 1307, which the King of France and the pope had orchestrated to take down the Order. The Queen of Cities had suffered its own catastrophic upheaval around a hundred years earlier, when the pope’s army had raped and pillaged it in 1204 after besieging it for close to a year. Blood had flowed, ankle-deep, down the streets. Great fires had ravaged it for days on end, wiping out a third of its buildings. Anything that was left standing had been looted and ransacked beyond recognition. In the aftermath, anyone who could afford to do so had moved away. Once the world’s marketplace and the proud home of God’s emperor on Earth, the New Rome had been turned into a city of ruins.

Its conquerors hadn’t had much joy in ruling over it. Its first Latin emperor, Baldwin, was captured by the Bulgarians during a skirmish near Adrianople less than a year into his reign. They chopped his arms and legs off and dumped him in a ravine, where he was said to have survived for three whole days. His successors didn’t fare much better. They only managed to hang on to the city for five decades before their infighting and incompetence brought their reign to a humiliating end.

The Byzantine emperor who retook the city in 1261, Michael VIII, saw himself as a new Constantine and set about restoring it to its former glory. Palaces and churches were refurbished, streets repaired, hospitals and schools founded. But reality soon put a cap on these ambitions. For one thing, money was tight. The Byzantine Empire wasn’t much of an empire anymore. It was much smaller than it had been, effectively no more than a minor Greek state, which meant that its rulers were only receiving a fraction of the tax and customs revenues they had previously enjoyed. Worse, its eastern flanks were under constant attack. Bands of nomadic Turks were further chipping away at the fractured and shrunken empire. Fleeing refugees from the beleaguered provinces, penniless and desperate, were now crowding the city, living in squalor in overcrowded shantytowns and across its rubbish dumps, further straining its economy. A harsh winter had only made matters worse, a late frost wiping out large tracts of crop-land and exacerbating the food shortages.

The chaos and the turmoil suited Conrad. He needed the anonymity that a city in flux could offer. And there was good money to be made if you knew where to find it: the pockets of gullible, visiting clerics from the churches and cathedrals of the wealthy West.

Constantinople may have been stripped of anything of value a hundred years earlier, but it was still an Aladdin’s cave of holy relics. Hundreds of them were believed to be scattered around the city, tucked away in its many churches and monasteries, waiting to be pilfered and sold. They were of great value to the priests of Western Europe. A cathedral, a church, or a priory far from the Holy Land would gain tremendously in stature—and, hence, in contributions—once it housed a major relic originating from those distant shores. The faithful wouldn’t have to embark on long and expensive pilgrimages and travel across land and sea to see, and perhaps even touch, the bone of a martyr or a splinter from the True Cross. Which was why many clerics came to Constantinople, in search of a trophy they could take back to their home church. Some paid good money, others schemed and stole—whatever it took to secure their prize.

Conrad was there to help.

Even if, far more often than not, the prize wasn’t exactly what he claimed it to be.

Like any parlor trick, it was, he knew, all in the presentation. Invest in the right packaging, get the backstory right, and buyers would be lining up for a shard of the Crown of Thorns or a fragment from the robe of the Virgin Mary.

“Another satisfied customer?” the tavern keeper asked as he brought over a fresh pitcher of beer.

“Is there any other kind?”

“Bless you, my son,” the barkeep chuckled. He set the pitcher on the table and nodded toward the back of the bar. “There’s someone waiting for you out back. A Turk. Said his name was Qassem. Said you’d know who he was.”

Conrad poured himself a glass and downed it in one chug, then set it down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Out back? Now?”

The barkeep nodded.

Conrad shrugged, then pushed the reliquary toward him. “Look after this for me until I get back, will you?”

He found the man waiting by a stack of empty barrels outside the rear entrance to the tavern. He’d met Qassem and his father shortly after arriving in the city a little over a year ago. He’d taken an instant dislike to Qassem, a brooding, muscular young man in his early twenties whose eyes lacked any trace of warmth. The father, Mehmet, was a different story. A tub of fat, hairy flesh, he was a dumpling of a man with a wide forehead, bulging eyes, and a short, thick neck. He was also a consummate trader, one who could sell you something then buy it right back from you at half price and make you feel like he was doing you a favor.

He also had access to whatever Conrad needed to pull off his scams, and he didn’t ask too many questions.

“My father has something he thinks you might be interested in,” Qassem told him.

“I’ll fetch my horse,” Conrad replied, not knowing that the young Turk’s mundane announcement was about to upend his life.

HE RECOGNIZED THE BROADSWORDS IMMEDIATELY.

There were six of them, sheathed in their leather scabbards, laid out on a wooden table in Mehmet’s small shop. Alongside them were other weapons that only confirmed Conrad’s startling realization: four crossbows, a couple of dozen composite horn bows, and an assortment of daggers and bread knives.

Weapons with which he was very familiar.

The broadswords were what interested him most. Though modest in appearance, they were formidable tools of warfare. Brutally efficient, expertly fabricated, perfectly balanced, but with none of the gaudy ornamentation commonly found on the grips and pommels of the swords of the nobility. A Templar’s sword was not an ostentatious display of wealth, nor could it be—the warrior-knights lived under vows of strict poverty. It was a weapon of war, pure and simple. A comfortable cruciform hilt crowning a pattern-welded blade, designed to carve through the flesh and bone of any enemy as well as through any chain mail that aspired to protect it.

The swords did, however, have one small distinguishing feature, barely noticeable, but definitely there: the initials of the sword’s owner, on either side of a small splayed cross—the croix pattee used by the Order—the lot engraved on the upper section of the blade, just below the cross guard.

Initials that Conrad also instantly recognized.

An avalanche of images and feelings rolled over him.

“Where did you get these?”

Mehmet studied him with undisguised curiosity, then his doughy face relaxed into a satisfied grin. “So you like my little collection?”

Conrad tried to keep a lid on the disturbance bubbling inside him, but he knew that the Turkish trader wasn’t easily fooled. “I’ll take the whole lot off you at the price you ask, but I need to know where you found them.”

The Turk eyed him with added curiosity, then asked, “Why?”

“That’s my business. Do you want to sell them or not?”

The trader pursed his lips and rubbed his chin with his puffy fingers, then relented. “I bought them from some monks. We came across them at a caravanserai three weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“East of here, about a week’s ride away.”

“Where?” Conrad pressed.

“In Cappadocia. Near the city of Venessa,” the trader added, somewhat grudgingly.

Conrad nodded, deep in thought, his mind already racing ahead. He and his two fellow knights had slipped through the surreal landscape of that region on their way to Constantinople. They’d skirted around several caravanserais, huge trading posts that were dotted along the silk road, built by Seljuk sultans and grandees to encourage and protect the traders who worked the camel trails between Europe and Persia and farther on to China.

“Is that where their monastery is?”

“No. All they said was that it was up in the mountains somewhere,” the trader said. “They were scrounging around for food supplies, selling whatever they could. They’ve got a drought out there that’s killed off anything the frost didn’t.” He chuckled. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter where it is. You can’t possibly be thinking of going there.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous territory, especially for a Frank like you. You’d be crossing half a dozen different beyliks to get there and risk coming across ten times as many bands of Ghazis along the way.”

Conrad knew he was right. Since the fall of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the entire region east of Constantinople had broken up into a tapestry of independent beyliks, emirates ruled by beys. The beys’ armies were heaving with mercenary Ghazis, warriors of the faith who were hungry for either victory or for what they referred to as “the honey of martyrdom,” with no particular preference either way. They were fierce fighters and kept a tight grip on the lands they controlled. It had been hard enough for him and his brethren to sneak through it unnoticed. It would be an entirely different proposition this time around: out in the open, asking around, trying to locate a monastery that probably didn’t want to be found.

“We, on the other hand, would have much less trouble getting through,” the trader suggested, settling back, his smug smile multiplying the folds that buttressed his chin. “And it wouldn’t be too difficult to disguise you and bring you along as one of us.”

Conrad eyed the wily trader. The man had sniffed something of value, that much was obvious.

He’d deal with that when the time came. First things first.

“How much?”

“It all depends on what you’re after,” the trader said.

“A chat.”

It was evidently not what the trader was hoping to hear. Then again, Conrad didn’t imagine he really expected him to tell him the whole truth.

The trader shrugged. “In that case, double the price of these fine items,” he said as he waved his meaty arm across the array of swords and knives. “Each way.”

It was, in the words of the old priest, an outrageous price. But the fake bones would more than cover it.

Besides, it was for a worthy cause.

The worthiest of them all.

“I’ll let you know,” Conrad said.

Mehmet gave him a contented smile and a small, theatrical bow. “I’m at your service, my friend.”

They stuffed the swords and knives into a sack of coarse cloth, which Conrad tied to the pommel of his saddle. He was just trotting away from the store when he came across her.

Qassem’s sister, Maysoon. Heading back to her father’s shop.

Seeing her threw him into instant disarray.

After all the years of strict celibacy in the fortresses of the Holy Land, he’d become reasonably comfortable around women now that he was living among them. But something about her made his heart gallop. By any standard, she was staggeringly alluring. A tall, graceful young woman with blistering turquoise eyes, flawless honey-colored skin, and a cascade of luscious curves that hinted teasingly from under her dark, flowing robe, she was impossible to ignore.

As she sauntered toward him, he pulled on the reins, slowing his stallion right down to just shy of stopping in its tracks, trying to extend the moment as long as possible. Their eyes met. It wasn’t the first time they had, and, as before, she didn’t turn away. She just kept an enigmatic gaze locked on him, igniting a bonfire of turmoil within him. In the half dozen times he’d seen her, they hadn’t exchanged more than a few polite pleasantries. Her father or her brother was inevitably there, his presence hastening her retreat. Qassem’s body language, in particular, projected a fiercely possessive attitude toward her, one that she heeded in silence. Conrad had noticed some bruising around one of her eyes and by the edge of her mouth on one occasion, but he hadn’t had the opportunity to find out what had caused them. He was never alone with her, never able to really engage her the way he wanted. He knew this encounter wouldn’t be any different, given that they were still within sight of the shop. All he could do was give her a slight nod of acknowledgment and watch helplessly as she glided by, her eyes challenging his as long as they could before tearing away and breezing past.

He resisted turning to watch her drift away, and nudged his horse into a canter. As he rode on, he couldn’t think about anything else. He’d faced this inner conflict before and still hadn’t figured out how to handle it. Up until recently, his entire adult life had been about sacrifice. He had gifted himself to a strict monastic Order and vowed to obey its Rule without hesitation. Like any monk, he’d committed himself to a rigidly regulated life stripped of any kind of possessions, wife, or family. As a warrior-monk, he had to contend with the added burden of quite possibly having his life cut short by a scimitar or an arrow. That sacrifice had already cost him dearly, as he’d left a part of himself on the blood-soaked soil of Acre, a part he would never get back.

But this was all of the past.

The Order was no more.

He was a civilian now, free from the extreme constraints of his previous life. And yet he still felt caught between both worlds, still found it hard to fully embrace his newfound freedom.

It had been hard enough before he met her.

Thinking about her now, he remembered a particular Templar Rule, one that forbade knights from hunting of any kind—except for lions. An odd rule, given that no lions roamed the lands where Templars lived and fought. Early on, Conrad had been taught that it was an allusion to its scriptural symbolism: “Your adversary, the devil, roams as a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” He knew it referred to the struggle between man and the beast of desire, a conflict that all knights constantly strove to overcome.

He wasn’t sure he’d be able to overcome it much longer.

Which caused him even more turmoil, now that the past he thought he’d left behind had reached out and grabbed him by the throat.

He had work to do.

“IT’S OVER, CONRAD,” Hector of Montfort told him. “You know what those bastards have done in Paris. For all we know, the others have been put to the torch as well by now.”

They sat cross-legged under a blanket of stars, around a small fire in a room of a dilapidated old mansion that had lost its roof and its owners decades ago. Three former brothers-in-arms, three rugged men who had escaped an unjust arrest warrant and were now reinventing themselves in a foreign land.

Conrad, Hector, and Miguel of Tortosa.

The news they’d heard a few weeks earlier had been devastating. In February, well over six hundred of their brethren who had been arrested in France had changed their minds and recanted their earlier confessions. They’d decided to defend their Order against the king’s outlandish accusations. A brave move, but an ill-fated one: By denying their previous confessions, they became lapsed heretics, which carried the penalty of death by burning. That May, fifty-four of them had been burned at the stake in Paris. Other Templars suffered the same fate elsewhere across France.

Hundreds of others now awaited their turn.

“We have to try and save them,” Conrad insisted. “We have to try and save our Order.”

“There’s nothing to save, Conrad,” Miguel countered, tossing one of the broadswords back into the pile of scabbards and knives that Conrad had shown them. “Ever since Acre and the loss of the Falcon Temple, our Order has been dead and buried.”

“Then we have to bring it back to life,” Conrad said, his face blazing with fervor. “Listen to me. If we can recover what Everard and his men lost, we can do it.”

Hector glanced at Miguel. They both looked weary, clearly still reeling from what Conrad had told them when he’d showed them the weapons earlier that evening. As one of the master and commander’s favorites, Conrad had been invited into the small circle of knights who knew the Order’s real history. He had been privy to what Everard of Tyre and his men had been sent out to do back in 1203. Hector and Miguel hadn’t. They hadn’t been aware of the secrets of the Order. Not until this night.

It was a lot to take in.

“Be realistic, brother,” Miguel sighed. “What can three men do against a king and a pope? They’d have us up on those stakes before we managed to utter a single word.”

“Not if we have it,” Conrad said. “Not if we play it right. Look, it brought them to their knees before. Nine men built a small empire with it. We can do the same. We can rebuild what we had and continue their work.”

He studied his fellow knights. They were different now. Older, for one. It had been almost twenty years since they had all fought together at Acre. Older, heavier, slowed by the spoils of an unfettered life. He felt a flutter of doubt and wondered if he believed his own words. What he was asking of them was a tall order, a huge sacrifice for something that carried a far-from-certain outcome.

“We can stay here, turn our backs on our past and live out our lives like this,” he told them. “Or we can remember our vows. Our mission. We can remember all those who gave their lives for our cause and try to ensure that they didn’t die in vain. I say there is no choice here. We have to try.” He reached down and grabbed one of the broadswords. “These swords could have ended up in the hands of any trader in the land. But they didn’t. They found me. They found us. We can’t ignore that. Our brothers are calling out to us from their graves. Tell me you’re not going to turn a deaf ear to their pleas.”

He looked at Hector. The Frenchman held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded slowly. Conrad nodded back, then turned to Miguel. The Spaniard glanced at Hector, then shook his head with a slight chortle before giving them a nod that was dripping with reluctance.

THEY RODE OUT FOUR DAYS LATER: Conrad, his two brother-knights, Mehmet and his son, along with four other men that the trader had drafted in as muscle.

Much to the trader’s curiosity, Conrad wasn’t on horseback. Unlike Hector and Miguel, who were, he was driving an old and rickety open-top, horse-drawn wagon.

“You never said anything about a wagon,” the trader told him. “This is going to slow us down.”

“Which has implications on our agreed price, is that it?”

The trader gave him a toothy, mock-offended smile. “Have I ever been anything less than fair?”

“You’re a pillar of virtue,” Conrad said. “Now name your new price and let’s get moving.”

They were soon riding out of the city, heading toward the rising sun. A day later, they left Byzantine territory and crossed into land that was now controlled by the various beys.

Enemy territory.

Following the trader’s advice, the knights were dressed in a similar fashion to their escorts: simple dark robes and tunics, linen dolmans and sashes. Their faces were partially hidden under their turbans, and their belts carried scimitars, not swords.

The ruse worked.

Along with Mehmet’s verbal skills, it got them safely past a couple of bands of wandering Ghazis, and after eight days of hard riding, they reached the Sari Han, a huge, wide, and low stone edifice with no openings in its outer walls apart from a richly decorated entrance portal.

Once they were inside, finding the monastery proved more challenging. None of the caravaneers, or the han’s manager, seemed to know of its existence. They rode on and tried a few more caravanserais, without success. Days drifted by without any hint of promise until their persistence finally paid off when they came across a priest from a local Cappadocian rock church who knew of the monastery.

Despite his vague directions, and several steep crags and dizzying ravines later, they eventually found it: the small cluster of rooms, nestling in the base of a rock face, tucked away from the rest of the world.

Conrad asked Mehmet to join him for a closer look. They left their horses and the wagon with the others and crept up a small ridge, where they took up position behind a large rock, close enough to be able to identify the monks as they ventured in and out of the hermitage.

Mehmet soon spotted one of the monks who’d sold him the swords.

The rest, Conrad needed to do alone.

They rejoined the others. Conrad recovered his horse and led it up to the monastery, on his own.

He was still making his way up the rock-strewn incline when two young acolytes came out, alerted by his struggling horse’s whinnies and the clatter of its hooves. By the time he made it up to the hermitage, its entire population was outside, watching him curiously and in silence. Then the abbot, a withered old man by the name of Father Nicodemus, came out and studied him cautiously before inviting him inside.

They sat in the refectory, surrounded by a half dozen other monks. After accepting a drink of water, Conrad didn’t waste too much time on any idle banter beyond telling them his name—his real one—and saying he had come from Constantinople, despite the fact that the monks were eager to hear news of the city’s current state.

“I’m not here by accident, Father,” he told the abbot.

“Oh?”

“I’m here because of something you sold not long ago.”

“Sold? And what would that be?”

“Some swords.” He paused, eyeing the priest, studying every wrinkle around the man’s eyes and at the edge of his mouth before adding, “Templar swords.”

The word visibly rattled the monk. It wasn’t hard for Conrad to catch the tells—the blinks, the dry lips, the fidgety fingers, the adjustments of position. The monks had spent most of their lives in seclusion, cut off from any kind of social interaction. They weren’t well versed in the art of deception. Why the monk was rattled, though, wasn’t as obvious.

“You do know what swords I’m talking about, correct?”

The monk hesitated, then stammered out a reply. “Yes, I do.”

“I need to know how you came across them.”

The monk said nothing for a long second, processing the request, his expression somewhat defensive. An uncomfortable smile crawled out of the corners of his mouth. “Why is that, may I ask?”

Conrad’s face remained hard, his eyes unforgiving. “They belonged to brothers of mine.”

“Brothers?”

Conrad drew his broadsword slowly and laid it down on the table in front of the abbot. He tapped his finger at the engraving at the top of its blade.

The abbot leaned in for a closer look.

Conrad was indicating the splayed cross.

“Templar knights,” Conrad told him. “Like myself.”

The creases in the abbot’s brow multiplied.

“How did they end up in your possession?” Conrad asked.

“I … I’m not sure. They’re very old, you know. They’ve been sitting in one of the storerooms for ages. It’s just that with the cold and the drought, we couldn’t feed ourselves anymore. We needed to sell something. And, as you can see, there isn’t much else that we can sell.”

Conrad really didn’t like the feeling he was getting from the old monk. “And you don’t know how they got here?”

The monk shook his head. “They’ve been here for a long, long time. From before my time.”

Conrad nodded, mulling it slowly, making it clear he wasn’t satisfied with the answer and consciously stretching his host’s discomfort. “You keep a chronicle here, do you not?” he finally asked.

The question seemed to surprise the abbot. “Of course. Why?”

“I’d like to look at it.”

The abbot’s blinking intensified. “Our chronicles are … they’re private documents. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do,” Conrad said without smiling. “But I still need to see them. Brothers of mine went missing. Their trail ends here, with these swords. In your monastery. I’m sure you understand.”

The monk’s eyes were nipping away and back to Conrad’s face. He couldn’t hold the knight’s gaze.

“I need to see the entries from the year of our Lord 1203 onwards,” Conrad added. “That’s when they went missing. And I imagine that the day their swords and the rest of their weapons came to be in this place would be an event that would have certainly merited a mention in your records. And yet you’re telling me no one here has read of such a thing?” He surveyed the tight expressions of the other monks in the room. They were mostly young and slim, with gaunt faces and pale skin. They were also uniformly staring at him with mouths clasped shut, a few of them giving him slight shakes of the head.

“No one?” Conrad asked again. “Not even your chronicler? Who is the chronicler here?”

One of the monks hesitated, then raised a meek hand and shuffled forward by a step.

Conrad asked, “You don’t know of this event?”

The man shook his head. “I do not.”

Conrad turned his attention back to the abbot. “It seems we have some reading to do.”

The abbot took in a deep breath, then nodded. He ordered the chronicler to take Conrad to see the books. “I’ll join you in the scriptorium,” he told the knight. “You look tired and pale, Brother Conrad. I’m sure you could use some nourishment after your long journey.”

Conrad followed the chronicler into the large, windowless hall. Large candelabras laden with dozens of candles illuminated its desks and its book-lined shelves. The chronicler padded over to a far shelf, studied the spines of the leather-bound codices on it, then pulled out two volumes and carried them back. He set them down on a large, tilted desk and invited Conrad to study them.

Conrad took a seat at the table and started scouring the entries for the right date. He knew that Everard and his men had left Tortosa at the beginning of summer that year. He was still wading carefully through the brittle vellum pages when the abbot reappeared with his entourage of young acolytes. In one hand, the monk was a carrying a plate that had some cheese and a chunk of bread loaf on it. In the other, he held a cup.

He placed them on a flat board that extended from the side of the desk. “It’s not much, but I’m afraid it’s all I can offer you,” the abbot said.

Conrad watched him do it. Oddly, the abbot’s hands were trembling, causing the cup to do a little dance before settling down on the board. “It’s plenty,” Conrad said, a crease forming in his brow. “You have my gratitude, Father.”

He picked off a small corner of the bread and popped it in his mouth, then raised the cup. It was filled with a hot, golden-yellow liquid. Conrad brought it close and took a sniff of it. It wasn’t a smell he was familiar with.

“Aniseed,” the abbot said. “We grow it here. When the frost and the drought permit it.”

Conrad shrugged and brought the cup to his mouth.

As its hot edge touched his lips, his eyes settled on the abbot’s gaze, and an alarm went off somewhere in the dungeons of his brain. Something was wrong. The man’s interest was too intense and all his little tells had accelerated.

Conrad’s mind lined up what he knew. And in that instant, he thought the unthinkable.

It’s not possible, he thought. They can’t be hiding that.

And yet it was there. A loud siren blaring away inside his ears. Years of dealing with treachery in the Holy Land had sharpened his senses and taught him to expect betrayal at every corner, and living incognito in a foreign land had only heightened those senses even more. Senses that were now warning him that the unthinkable would actually explain a lot.

He kept the cup poised at his lips and, without taking a sip from it, studied the abbot’s face.

He pushed it away a bit, clear from his mouth.

“You know,” he told the abbot, “you seem rather pale yourself. Perhaps you need this more than I do.” He extended his hand, presenting him with the cup.

“No, no, I’m perfectly content,” the abbot said as he pulled back slightly. “Please. We’ll eat when the day’s work is finished.”

Conrad didn’t blink. He leaned in and pushed the cup closer to the abbot while placing his other hand very clearly on the hilt of a large dagger he had on his belt. “I insist,” he said.

He kept the cup there, hovering inches from the priest’s face. Tiny tremors broke out across the old man’s face, ruffling up the edges of his mouth, his nostrils, his eyelids.

“Take it,” Conrad ordered.

The man did so, his hand shivering.

“Drink,” Conrad hissed.

The abbot’s hand was quaking noticeably now, almost causing the drink to spill out of the cup as it slowly crept closer to his mouth. It reached his lips. He held it there for a moment, his hand shaking even more, his eyes ablaze with fear and darting from the cup to Conrad and back.

“Drink it, Father,” Conrad pushed, his tone calm but potent.

The monk closed his eyes and looked like he was about to take a sip from the cup, then he stopped abruptly and let go of it. It fell from his hands and shattered against the stone floor.

Conrad’s eyes bored into the monk as he pulled his dagger out slowly and laid it out on the table. “Now, how about you tell me how those swords really ended up here?”

“WE’LLBEFINE,” Conrad told the trader as he handed him the small pouch. “We can handle it from here.”

Mehmet took a quick glance at the gold pieces inside the pouch, then pulled its ties tight and tucked it under his belt. “It’s a long way back to Constantinople. These are dangerous lands. Plenty of Ghazis out there.”

“We’ll be fine,” he repeated. “We’re not going back there.”

“Oh?”

Conrad just nodded and struck out his hand, his expression clearly signaling that he wouldn’t be saying much more about that. The portly trader frowned, then took his hand and shook it grudgingly.

“Safe travels then,” the trader told him.

“And to you.”

He stood with Hector and Miguel and watched as the Turks rode off. Conrad had no illusions about what was probably going on in the trader’s mind. They had paid him a small fortune to guide them to this place, and they had brought a wagon with them. A wagon to carry something. Something that had to have great value if it was worth the risk and the cost.

Something the trader would instinctively covet.

“I’m guessing you found something,” Hector told him.

“That I did,” Conrad said, keeping watch as the six riders disappeared down the mountain. His mouth broadened with the hint of a cheeky grin. “That I did.”

FATHER NICODEMUS SAT at the chronicler’s worktable and felt increasingly nauseous with every line he wrote. The weight of his burden was clouding his mind, turning the selection of each word into a herculean effort. Still, he had to do it. There was no road back. Not from this.

We should have burnt it, he thought. We should have burnt it all, long ago. He’d thought about it many times over the years, wondered about doing it, even coming close on a couple of occasions. But like his predecessors, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Like all his predecessors, he didn’t dare do it for fear of transgressing and bringing upon himself a wrath not of this Earth.

He felt the heavy gaze of his gathered acolytes upon him, but he couldn’t look up and face them. He just concentrated on the sheets of vellum under his eyes and tried to keep his hand steady as it moved the quill across it.

I have failed my Church, he wrote. I have failed our Church and our Lord and from that failure, there is no possible redemption. I fear that the knight Conrad and his fellow Templars have sealed our fate. They now roam the land, headed to Corycus and from there to shores unknown, laden with the devil’s handiwork, written in his hand using poison drawn from the pits of hell, its accursed existence a devastating threat to the rock upon which our world is founded. I would not presume to seek forgiveness or mercy for our failure. All I can offer is this simple act to save our heavenly father from the burden of tending to our miserable souls.

He gave the sheets another read, his eyes tired and watery. When he was finished, he set the quill down beside them and only then did he dare look up at the monks before him. They were all staring at him in silence, their faces more gaunt and pale than ever, their lips and fingers quavering.

In front of each of them was a simple terracotta cup.

The abbot cast his eyes across them, meeting each of their gazes with his own forlorn stare. Then he gave them a collective nod and raised his cup to his lips.

Each of them raised his own.

He nodded again.